Pierre
Dumarchey (1882-1970), under the best known of his many pen names 'Pierre
Mac Orlan', was one of France's most celebrated and popular 20th century
writers. Another quarter of this same century has elapsed since his death,
however, while for readers across the English Channel he remains scarcely
translated, remembered (mistily if at all) as the author of Quai des
Brumes (1927). Even here, it is not the novel itself but the screen
adaptation that will be familiar to British audiences. Marcel Carne's
masterly and evocative 1938 film stars four of France's greatest actors:
Gabin, Michele Morgan, Michel Simon and Pierre Brasseur, and the superb
script is by the redoubtable former Surrealist poet, Jacques Prevert. It's
a classic, and does cinematic justice at least to its prolific and Protean
author.

To
the latter pair of alliterative adjectives might be added a trio of others
quite as appropriate - painterly, pornographic, poetic. For Mac Orlan was
not only a widely travelled and wide-ranging writer, but a visual artist
interested in exploring all the newer varieties and developments of the
art forms of his time. Apart from his own novels and poetry, he turned his
hand to radio, film, journalism, gramophone recordings, photography,
songwriting (for Germaine Montero, Juliette Greco, Yves Montand and
others), art criticism, and much else - the last phrase covering an
extraordinary and copious output of erotica in both prose and poetry. And
in 1950 this former bohemian, the resolute modernist who nonetheless loved
rugby and Kipling and wrote a book on Toulouse-Lautrec; this friend of
Apollinaire and Picasso, interviewer of Mussolini and hero of World War I
- a complex talent if ever there was - became something of a grand old man
upon his unanimous election to the Academie Goncourt. By the time of his
death he had overseen about half of the 25 volumes of his Complete Works
scheduled for publication in the Cercle du Bibliophile series,
introduced by Raymond Queneau.

Mac
Orlan is credited with writing 22 novels, and (in 1994) there were no less
than 16 titles by this ever-popular author available in Gallimard's Folio
series: none of his erotic work is usually included or listed, let alone
available. One critic, the judicious Patrick Kearney, has remarked that
Mac Orlan is "not the only author whose career had a hidden aspect to
it" (1). This seems almost an understatement, for
as well as 'Mac Orlan', various pseudonyms were employed: Pierre du
Bourdel, Sadie Blackeyes, Docteur Fowler, Le Chevalier de X..., and
Sadinet.

Some
of his later erotic works in the 1920s and '30s were completely anonymous,
while to others he put his real name, Pierre Dumarchey. (But even that
name is spelt 'Dumarchais' in recent Hachette and Oxford literary guides!)
Who then was this elusive character?

He
was born in Northern France, in Peronne, a small town east of Amiens and
also on the River Somme, on 26 February 1882. It was the year that one of
his future favourite writers and main influences, Robert Louis Stevenson,
published Treasure Island. Dumarchey's father was an infantry officer,
stationed in the town, and he and his brother were soon sent away to
Orleans. There they were brought up by an uncle, a schools inspector, and
educated at the local lycee. At 17 the restless and adventurous Dumarchey
broke with his uncle, leaving teacher training college at Rouen in order
to pursue a career as an artist, in Paris... It must have been towards the
end of his time in Rouen, though, that Dumarchey first got a taste of and
for lowlife: in 1900 he'd lived in the sleazy Rue des Charrettes, lodging
at the Albion Bar, a sailors' haunt. (In 1927 he was to publish Rue des
Charrettes, and by 1940 he could write, in a chapter of Chronique de la
fin d'un monde, on the 'romanticism of Rouen'. But after nearly two
years of miserable poverty in the capital, writing some
Symbolist-influenced poetry, painting walls (rather than murals or even
canvases) and scarcely managing to live, he returned to Rouen late in 1901
and for three years worked as proof reader for the main newspaper there.
He learned the accordion, and continued to write until his military
service. Between 1905 and 1908 he "lived the Ilfe of a vagabond"
(2) travelling to London, Zeebrugge, Palermo, Naples
and Marseilles.

By
1908, however, he was back in Paris, roughing it once again, but this time
in much more congenial (and, indeed, supportive) bohemian company. The
volatile cosmopolitan bunch of mainly young and struggling painters who
were to make Cubism, and those writers who would interpret and promote the
movement, were becoming friends and allies, socialising and grouping
against the bourgeoisie, and inhabiting, for the most part, one especially
rundown area of Montmartre. As Roger Shattuck has written: "To a
greater extent than at any time since the Renaissance, painters, writers,
and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each
other's arts in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration." (3)
During that extraordinarily creative era just before the First World War,
in those cheap artisans' and workmens' bars and restaurants of the
quartier might be found Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Utrillo, Matisse,
Picabia, Modigliani, Andre Salmon, Gris, Derain, Cendrars, Van Dongen,
Braque, Reverdy, Dorgeles, Carco - and Dumarchey.

Many
of them, Dumarchey included, lived at one time or another in the famous
Bateau Lavoir, a huge squalid tenement at 13 Rue Ravignan, thus named by
Max Jacob because of its odd flat roof and "its resemblance to the
ugly Seine river barges used as washhouses. Another of its names, 'The
Trapper's Hut', was suggested by the dark labyrinthine hallways that led
from one rickety ascent to another throughout its rambling length. Tenants
had neither gas nor electricity; water came from a single tap over a sink
used by the occupants of some ten or more studios.(4)
Rents at the Bateau Lavoir were, however, extremely cheap, and this
ramshackle building clinging to the side of the Butte Montmartre also
housed a few small businesses, both legitimate and shady, and some
prostitutes. Plenty of material, in fact, for Dumarchey to draw on, which
he duly did later in his career... He was also in those days an occasional
resident of the Hotel Bouscarat - a cheap lodging house and favoured
eating place on the Place du Tertre. When he lacked means to pay his
bills, Dumarchey slept rough on the Square Saint Pierre. "Invariably
in racing cyclist's gear, and nicknamed by his friends The Captain",
Dumarchey was, necessarily, a resilient and popular character in the
quartier. (5)

He
would eat with Salmon, Jacob and Apollinaire on Saturday nights at Mere
Adele's 'baraque' in the Rue Norvins, or they would go on to the 'Lapin a
Gill' (which became better known as the 'Lapin Agile'). The latter was a
rough and friendly 'cabaret rustique' in Rue des Saules, whose owner,
Frederic Gerard, played guitar. There's a lively description of it by
Francis Carco, who, like the gregarious Dumarchey himself and Roland
Dorgeles, would evoke it in later works:

"...it
really did rain those nights - or else it snowed, while the drunkest of us
slept stretched out on a bench, and inoffensive white mice, sly and
unafraid, pattered across the chimney-piece. How to describe the
atmosphere of our long vigils? It drew its essence from the haphazard
setting, in which obscene clay models, a huge Christ figure in plaster,
and canvases by Picasso, Utrillo... all had a place. The dense pipe-smoke
added to it. And Frederic, armed with his guitar, Mac Orlan dressed in
cowboy style, the dampness of the walls, the barking dogs, the secret
despair of each of us, our poverty, our youth, the time that had gone by -
all these completed it." (6)

The
years in Montmartre before World War One were crucial for Mac Orlan, as he
was now more usually known: a testing-time, an apprenticeship, a taste of
experiences that would serve as useful source material - along, too, with
some measure of success. By his late twenties he had published (apart from
the erotica discussed on the ensuing pages) several other collections of
stories, himself illustrating some of them. His successful and prolific
career was well under way. In 1913 he married Marguerite Luc, the daughter
of one of Frederic's mistresses, and he was to remain happily married to
her until her death half a century later. The rest of Mac Orlan's long and
eventful life, following on from his formative Parisian years, can only be
briefly summarized here for the benefit of English language readers.

He
fought in the French army, was wounded in 1916 during the attack on Mont
Saint-Quentin; was decorated, and luckily survived the conflict, traveling
at its end through Germany during 1918-19 as a war correspondent. By 1927
he and his wife had retired to the country - Saint Cyr-sur-Morin, about 40
miles due east of Paris-where they lived together until their respective
deaths. Mac Orlan worked from his home there primarily as novelist,
essayist and journalist. (In the latter capacity, for instance, he was in
Berlin in 1933 for France-Soir, just when Hitler seized power).
After the end of the Second World War, the French-based American publisher
and critic Samuel Putnam could write: "Some, like Mac Orlan...
endeavoured to erect a new Jules Verne era through a discovery with
fresh-seeing eyes of the exotic geography of that world in which they
found themselves." (7). It was true enough and
besides, Mac Orlan had always been a survivor: he branched out next into
radio and songwriting, and by 1950, when the last of his many novels
appeared he was an Academician. This genuinely popular and multi-faceted
writer lived on until 1970.

There's
a jovial yet pugnacious-looking photograph of him in one edition of
Larousse, wearing a Tam'o'shanter and tartan jacket; others show him with
a megot clinging, Jean Gabin-style, to his lower lip. It seems he
"cultivated an eccentric appearance, habitually being photographed in
his favourite garb of golf trousers, old sweater, woolly slippers and
Scottish beret with pom-pom, along with accessories of pipe and accordion.
He gave short shrift to all those who quizzed him about the romantic times
as a struggling artist in Paris, saying that there was nothing romantic or
remotely enviable about being poor and hungry." (8)
The commentator adds: "It's a pity Peronne has only honoured him with
a car park and small concert hall". But I suspect that the always
unconventional Mac Orlan - if no longer an actual bohemian, no matter how
often he reinvented himself - would not really have given a damn.

This
expert spinner of yarns (who freely acknowledged his debt to Defoe,
Conrad, Poe and Stevenson, as well as to Rimbaud, Schwob and Apollinaire)
lived his 88 years to the full. At more or less the halfway stage of Mac
Orlan's life, one perceptive critic, Andre Billy, could discuss the
writer's special, exotic storytelling ('le fantastique social'):
those strange, often humorous, adventures encountered in - so-called -
everyday life; the weirdly skewed imaginative vision and the way the
century's malaise was caricatured, viewed as if through an opium- or
alcohol-tinted lens. Billy speculates, finally, which literary direction
Mac Orlan might take next:

But
Mac Orlan had always been wonderfully unpredictable, and was never so easy
to pigeonhole or pin down. Not until after his death (and following upon
information supplied by friends such as Pascal Pia to researchers and
publishers like Jean-Jacques Pauvert), has the sheer amount of erotica
written by Mac Orlan been established, let alone assessed. It seems to
span well over 20 years, starting from around 1908 and continuing until
the 1930s or perhaps even later. One must therefore conclude that he had
not only an aptitude for the erotic genre, but a distinct taste for it.

As
Pauvert has pointed out, prior to World War One there was a busy and eager
market for flagellation literature in particular.(10)
This sort of book - the speciality of several Parisian publishers,
probably the best known of whom was Jean Fort - was freely and widely
circulated among forty or fifty booksellers throughout France, and
exported to the French colonies in particular and to foreign parts in
general. The most notable immediate precursor of Mac Orlan in this
thriving trade was the poet, essayist and novelist Georges Grassal
(1867-1905). Grassal, usually under his main pseudonym of Hugues Rebell,
wrote several classics of their kind, such as The Memoirs of Dolly
Morton.(11) Both authors absorbed many of the same
literary influences, while their bizarre romanticism, paradoxical
lifestyles and obsessively fertile and exotic imaginations suggest that
they had much in common.

Oddly
enough, the very first novel the 26 year old Mac Orlan published (as the 'Chevalier
de X...') in 1908, was entitled Georges. The central character
is an adolescent corrupted by an aristocratic Breton lady. This was
followed, the next year, by La Comtesse au touet in which the
author (writing as Dumarchey this time) continues the theme of the
beautiful, nobly born dominatrix - the latter here turning the male hero
into a 'dog-man'! 1909 saw Dumarchey publish Les Grandes Flagelees de l'histoire,
to which he also contributed twenty drawings and Masochism in America,
whose emphasis is once more upon young males being sternly disciplined by
a variety of forbidding yet attractive females. "Victims of
feminism" indeed! The usually reliable Kearney [op.cit] appears not
to have read or seen a copy of this rather rare work, for he seems to
assume it's from the 'Docteur Fowler' stable, referring as he does
to "pseudosexological studies with titles such as Le Masochisme en
Amerique". The book is certainly more interesting and provocative
than that, as readers of my translation will find out for themselves.

In
the next four years, leading up to the War, the indefatigable Dumarchey
wrote a further group of books for bookseller Jean Fort. For this series,
of which Petite Dactylo is perhaps the best known, he adopted a new
persona - Miss Sadie Blackeyes, supposedly a witty and attractive young
American novelist. The half dozen or so titles of what we might call his 'Sadiemasochism
period' all contain a plenitude of flagellatory and lesbian episodes, but
they invariably end happily, and, as Alexandrian [op.cit.] remarks: "On
y trouve beaucoup plus de fantaisie que de cruaute". This series
did prove enduringly popular however, and, as late as 1932, in 26 year old
Samuel Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to middling Women, can
be found the following: "He pressed this treasure upon her... he
forced her to take it. She did not want it, she said she did not. It was
no good to her, she would never read it, thank you very much all the
same." The protagonist here, Beckett's alter ego, Belacqua, is
offering his girlfriend as a token of his esteem a greatly-prized and
fine, if obscure, first edition. This she is reluctant to accept, adding:
"Now if he happened to have such a thing as a Sadie Blackeyes..."
A few pages into George Orwell's third novel, Keep The Aspidistra
Flying (1936), its hero, an aspiring poet who works in a bookshop
(he's jokily called Comstock, after the American purity
campaigner-cum-censor) fantasises about one potential customer's literary
taste. This "decentish middle-aged man" with "a guilty
look", muses Comstock, is obviously seeking "High Jinks in a
Parisian Convent by Sadie Blackeyes". It's clear that this particular
side of Dumarchey's output was, to rising Thirties intellectuals at least,
synonymous with Gallic naughtiness!

Rather
different - if nowhere as whimsical as Miss Blackeyes - is Adventures
amoureuses de Mademoiselle de Sommeranges (1910), written as 'Pierre
du Bourdel'. This is an historical tale whose far more extreme,
scatological and indeed harder-core excesses are the more convincing for
being set during the horrors of the French Revolution. Here the author
seems to have invented the 20th century's bodice-ripping genre, but
without compromise, hypocrisy or formula cliche. The mood is tougher, the
humour blacker - and the whole stunning performance is closer in tone to
the erotica produced a couple of years earlier for Jean Fort by Mac
Orlan's friend Apollinaire. It was followed the next year by Mademoiselle
de Mustelle et ses amies, another du Bourdel offering, this time a
parody of Petites filles modeles, an edifying work from 1858 aimed
at young people by its worthy and now forgotten author, the Comtesse de
Segur (1799-1874). The 20th century version has two rich, spoilt and very
young sisters running amorously amok in pursuit of precocious experience,
which, of course, is variously and rapidly gained.

When
Mac Orlan returned to civilian life after the War, he tasted his first
successes with 'literary' fiction. But in 1919 he was also back, and in
print this time as 'Sadinet', with Petites Cousines. it's a story
of the secret sex lives of families - pubescent affairs between relatives
- and quite different again in tone and style from books produced under
his other pseudonyms. A 1920 book he published with the highly respected
firm of Gallimard contains some charged erotic pages, as Pauvert [op.cit.]
has pointed out. From its title alone - Le Negre Leonard et Maitre Jean
Mullin, I would guess this to be a recycling, or a variant, expanded
version of the Van Ruttanfoort section in Masochism in America.
In any case, as Alexandrian [op.cit] notes, by the Twenties Mac Orlan was
bothering neither with pseudonyms nor signatures for his erotica. Himself
a more than competent caricaturist and draughtsman, he enjoyed producing
books with other artists. The anonymous 1924 publication Abecedaire des
filles et de l'enfant cheri is a series of erotic poems, illustrated
as distinctively (yet equally anonymously) with drawings by the renowned
Pascin. Two more books, dating from 1926, are traceable to Mac Orlan. La
Semaine secrete de Venus, comprised of a story for each day of the
week, is illustrated by another well known artist Marcel Vertes, and
contains, according to Alexandrian, "profound insights into perverse
psychology". Entree interdite au public, a collection of
erotic etchings by Vertes, has Mac Orlan returning the compliment and
contributing a Preface to the artist's book.

Doubtless
some assiduous researcher will track down other such works attributable to
Mac Orlan. It's highly unlikely that he simply stopped writing erotica
after thirty years or so spent perfecting the craft. What's more certain
is that he seems to have enjoyed producing it in one form or another, and
did so both professionally and enthusiastically. Many other innovative
20th century French writers (Jerry, Louis, Apollinaire, Aragon, Cocteau,
Bataille - to name only a handful) wrote prose and poetry erotica as just
part of their prolific outputs, but none were more industrious, varied or
popular than Mac Orlan in his day. It's a pity he's since been somewhat
eclipsed or overlooked. My translation of Masochism in America, the
first in English, hopes to redress the balance in his favour.

NOTES

(1)
A History of Erotic Literature, Patrick J. Kearney (Macmillan,
London 1982).